Navigating to directory in ZSH (bash)

Question

I'm using Oh-My-ZSH to create some ailises and functions for easing my repetitive work load.

I need to navigate from anywhere in my computer to my Frontend directory. This is what I have:

frontend(){
  cd ~/Desktop/Work/Frontend
  cd $1
}

Now this works well when I type frontend or frontend myProject, however, all my project folders are postfixed by something like .m, .tablet, etc.

How can I write things that:

• Will let me automatically navigate to a folder that is followed by .something

• When there are multiple options (like project.m and project.tablet) will prompt me with options similar to if you hit tab in your terminal and are given multiple options for autocomplete.

I hope my question makes sense.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Find a zsh solution first, followed by a bash solution.

Update: Turns out that a zsh implementation (based on builtin compctl) is much simpler than the bash implementation (based on builtin complete).

Save the code of interest to a file (e.g., frontend) and source it (e.g., . ./frontend); either interactively or, preferably, from your bash/zsh profile.

Once in place, auto-completion of subdirectory names in ~/Desktop/Work/Frontend will work as follows:

• Type, for instance, frontend myProject and press TAB.
• myProject is then prefix-matched against the names of the subdirectories in ~/Desktop/Work/Frontend:
  • If there's only 1 match, myProject will instantly expand to the full subdirectory name.
  • Otherwise, a beep sounds to indicate that there are multiple matches:
    • zsh: The names of all matching subdirectories are listed right away.
    • bash: Press TAB again to list the names of all matching subdirectories
    • Continue typing until the prefix match is unambiguous, then press TAB again.

Note: In bash, to also only require pressing TAB once to list multiple matches, add the following to your shell profile bind "set show-all-if-ambiguous on".

---

zsh solution:

# Define the shell function.
frontend(){
  cd ~/Desktop/Work/Frontend/"${1:-}"
}

# Tell zsh to autocomplete directory names in the same directory as
# the function's when typing a command based on the shell function.
compctl -/ -W ~/Desktop/Work/Frontend frontend

---

bash solution:

Note: complete -o dirnames doesn't take an argument, unfortunately - it always auto-completes for the current directory. Thus, a custom shell function that returns the potential matches, combined with -o filenames, is required.

# Define the main shell function.
frontend(){
    local BASEDIR=~/Desktop/Work/Frontend
  cd "$BASEDIR/${1:-}"
}

# Define the custom completion function.
_frontend_completions() {
    local BASEDIR=~/Desktop/Work/Frontend

    # Initialize the array variable through which
    # completions must be passed out.
  COMPREPLY=() 

    # Find all matching directories in the base folder that start
    # with the name prefix typed so far and return them.
  for f in "$BASEDIR/${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"*; do
    [[ -d $f ]] && COMPREPLY+=( "$(basename "$f")" )
  done

}

# Tell bash to autocomplete directory names as returned by the
# _frontend_completions() helper functoin when typing a command 
# based on the main shell function.
complete -o filenames -F _frontend_completions frontend fe

Answer 2

I strongly recommend you use AutoJump

But if you must, maybe you want to use alias
like in your ~/.zshrc add:

alias fend='cd path/to/frontend'